Pambazuka News 512: Crises of citizenship and identity: Sudan, DRC and Côte d’Ivoire
Pambazuka News 512: Crises of citizenship and identity: Sudan, DRC and Côte d’Ivoire
Luleki Sizwe, a small, all-volunteer group that campaigns for LGBT people, is based in Cape Town’s mostly poor black townships and rural areas. The organisation works with and supports women who have been victims of what has fast become a ubiquitous form of targeted sexual violence in South Africa: 'corrective rape' against gay women or women suspected of being gay, as a form of 'curing' them. A campaign of the organisation has garnered 130,000 signatures worldwide.
This paper explores social movements’ roles in challenging relationships of poverty and inequality. It begins by examining the motivations, emergence and strategies of these movements. The author then argues that movements are highly relevant to poverty reduction dialogue because they challenge the dominant way in which it is understood, and suggest alternative means of achieving it. Cases from Bolivia, India, Peru and South Africa are considered.
Sex work has increasingly become a popular means of making money for young girls in the urban areas in Malawi. This article makes reference to an intervention project in Malawi that was implemented in 2004 and sought to empower sex workers and to encourage them to insist on consistent use of condoms. The messages were also designed to encourage the young sex workers to modify their behaviour and withdraw from the practice.
Christiana Garpeh listened attentively with her headphones as she put together her first radio piece of the day. She ignored the Beyonce song playing in the newsroom to focus on transcribing an interview. The interview was with a woman from Pagos Island, a part of Monrovia cut off from the rest of the city by swamps. She was seeking donors for women's literacy classes and classes in soap making and tailoring. Each working day Garpeh produces about two such stories on the needs of women for broadcast by Liberia Women Democracy Radio, housed in a two-story building in Congo Town on the outskirts of Monrovia, the nation's capital.
The lives of Botswana’s transgender people are seemingly about to change for the better, following the registration of Rainbow Identity Association (RIA), a trans and intersex oriented organisation, formed in 2007 after founder, Skipper Mogapi, realised marginalisation of these gender identities among the general lesbian, gay and bisexual movement in that country.
No matter how many times researchers caution about the tendency to exaggerate the impact of information technologies (ITs) as 'magic bullets' to address a host of development challenges, common talk is predictably techno-optimistic, says this article on the website of the Communication Initiative. Policy makers, the media and aid organisations usually throw nuance aside to hail the arrival of the latest technology.
The South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (Saccawu) plans to picket a Massmart shareholders meeting to show opposition to the group's impending deal with Walmart, reports South Africa's Daily Times. Massmart's shareholders are expected to vote for the global retail giant's offer to acquire 51 per cent of Massmart's shares at the meeting. The anti-Walmart coalition includes the Congress of South African Trade Unions, social movements and civil-society organisations.
A four-part series of US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks shows that the US knew about the extent of corruption and discontent in Tunisia, and chose to support Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the now deposed Tunisian president, regardless. Written in June of 2006 by William Hudson, the US ambassador to Tunisia, the memos were composed just four months after Donald Rumsfeld, the then-US secretary of defence, visited Tunisia to discuss expanding military ties between the two countries.
Two South African groups have launched a move to get an arrest warrant issued against Tzipi Livni, the chairperson of Israel's Kadima party, during a visit to the country next week, Israeli media have said. Haaretz.com, quoting Channel 10, said the Media Review Network (MRN) and the Palestine Solidarity Alliance (PSA) allege Livni committed war crimes in her role in Israel's three-week war on Gaza in late 2008-2009. Livni was then foreign minister in the government of Ehud Olmert.
Nigeria's ruling Peoples Democratic Party has nominated incumbent Goodluck Jonathan as its presidential candidate after fending off a primary challenge in the country's mainly Muslim north. Jonathan's nomination on Friday allows him to stand in the April presidential elections, which are viewed as one of the most important in the history of Africa's most populous country.
State security agents ransacked Teranga FM last week, a community radio station located outside the capital, and ordered its closure, Reporters Without Borders has learned from various sources. Launched in 2009, Teranga FM is based in Sinju Alajie, about 20 km west of Banjul, the capital. It is funded by donations from the local population and advertising.
Over the past four years, violence against journalists and other media professionals in Somalia has escalated to an alarming level. Somalia is now the most deadly state in Africa for journalists. According to the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUOSJ), between 2007 and 2010, 22 journalists were targeted and murdered specifically for their journalism, 32 were wounded while conducting their journalistic work, 108 journalists were imprisoned, 200 journalists received death threats, and 250 journalists fled the country.
Traditional funding sources for NGOs are drying up and grants are being reduced due to various factors, says this article on Externally, the fact that South Africa is viewed as a middle income economy has resulted in decreased funding opportunities. It has also been noted that the inadequate expenditure of funds by the South African government has contributed to the decrease in donor funding. The recent economic recession has seen some funding organisations in the United States merging to survive, just like their United Kingdom counterparts. Some have indicated that they intend to focus on programmes that are replicable regionally, say, in a number of countries within the Southern Africa Developing Countries (SADC).
Like many of its neighbours in the region, Tunisia has long approached the internet as a force to be censored. Tunisians are barred from accessing a wide variety of sites, from the seemingly innocuous YouTube to sites providing information on human rights in their country. Yet, in a surprising speech in which Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the Tunisian president, announced that he will not run again for office, he also promised something long hoped-for by Tunisian netizens: Internet freedom.
As slain land rights activist Moses Mpoe was laid to rest on 11 December, thousands of community members gathered to mourn and remember him, reports The Press Institute. During the funeral, murmurs circulated suggesting that senior government officials and their families were responsible for Mpoe’s assassination, as Mpoe played a major role in a court case that aimed to return more than 30,000 acres of land in the area known as Mau Narok to the Maasai community, a semi-nomadic people indigenous to East Africa who are known for their distinctive dress and customs.
How is it possible that a woman living in a water-rich region only needs to open the tap to get enough water for herself and her family, while a woman in a water-scarce region has to walk for miles and miles to get far less water of much worse quality? This article has two parts. The first deals with dominant positions concerning water: the neoliberal agenda, consequences of water privatisation, and the UN stance. The second part looks at what is missing in this picture and ignored by the dominant perspectives - namely, global inequalities and gender discrimination.
Soldiers patrolling on the periphery of the BeitBridge border fence have been accused of sexually harassing desperate border jumpers intending to cross to South Africa. Zimbabweans living in South Africa who had come to the country hoping to acquire travel documents have been forced to leave the country without passports due to chaos at the Home Affairs Department. Sources who spoke to Radio VOP said women who use undesignated entry points into South Africa are subjected to sexual harassment including rape.
The International Organisation for Migration has confirmed that millions of Zimbabweans who left home and settled in foreign countries were economic refugees. 'The assessment we have done so far confirms that many Zimbabweans chose to move in pursuit of better economic opportunities, and with things improving in the country we expect an improvement in the returning of those immigrants,' IOM Deputy Chief of Mission to Zimbabwe, Katie Kerr told journalists on the sidelines of her organisation’s boat donation to the department of Civil Protection in Harare.
The Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa (HRLHA) is highly concerned about the safety of nine Oromo refugees from Ethiopia whose whereabouts are not known since they were extra-judicially arrested and taken away by members of the Djibouti force in Djibouti on different occasions in the months of November and December 2010, and January 2011. HRLHA has a profound belief that the two countries – Djibouti and Ethiopia – are acting jointly in hunting, arresting and punishing alleged members and/or supporters of opposition political organisations and human rights activists.
Human Rights Watch has called on Saudi Arabia to stop the deportation of Somali refugees back to the war-torn Horn of Africa nation, reports Bloomberg. Saudi authorities sent more than 150 people back to the Somalia capital, Mogadishu, on 17 December, HRW said, citing local press reports. Another 2,000 were returned in June and July, according to the United Nations.
The Ethiopian government has unveiled an HIV policy for its transport sector, which has grown significantly in recent years alongside the rapidly expanding road network. 'Various national studies have shown that those working across the transport sector - especially drivers and their assistants - are vulnerable to HIV infection as they spend considerable time away from their families,' said Ethiopia's transport authority director Kassahun Hailemariam.
In its push to expand participation in tertiary education, the government announced last week that opportunities for South Africans who passed school-leaving examinations in December would grow by 56 per cent this year. And under political pressure to provide free higher education, President Jacob Zuma promised students on state loans a free final year if they graduate.
President Jacob Zuma told party leaders this week to implement the government's new growth plan immediately, insisting it could be refined as they went along. With unemployment officially above 25 per cent of those actively looking for work, South Africa lost more than a million jobs in the recent global downturn. School-leavers and unskilled young men and women are the hardest hit by joblessness.
A leading academic has ripped into the country's education system saying it is failing South Africa's youth. Speaking at the graduation ceremony for the Eastern Cape Student Sponsorship Programme at Selborne College in East London, Rhodes University vice-chancellor Dr Saleem Badat called the state of education in the country a 'tragedy'. 'It is an absolute scandal that the South African school system functions the way it does in 2010, 16 years after the start of democracy in our country,' Badat said.
Cameroonian gay rights activist Alice Nkomo has come in for sharp criticism over a European Union grant meant to provide health training for sexual minorities in the conservative country. News of the euro 300,000 grant which was finalised last week has heightened already widespread sentiment against lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders in the west African country. Anti-gay movements in the country have urged the government to take the EU to task for providing the funds to Ms Nkomo’s organisation.
Some Muslim women in western Uganda are demanding that a new HIV prevention programme for Muslims include condom promotion, going against calls by local religious leaders for the programme to be limited to messages on faithfulness and abstinence. 'The holy Koran allows Muslim men to marry four wives, but men still go out of wedlock and have extra-marital relationships,' Jazira Mugisa told IRIN/PlusNews.
Sex workers operating in East Africa are generally aware of the HIV risks of unprotected sex, but for many of them, the extra cash incentive clients often offer for sex without a condom is worth the risk. According to Basilisa Ndayisaba, coordinator of local NGO Society for Women against AIDS in Africa (SWAA-Burundi), which raises awareness among sex workers on condom use and HIV risk, despite their best efforts, many sex workers in Bujumbura remain apathetic about condom use.
A very important patent decision may have just been made in Mumbai. Abbott Laboratories, one of the world's biggest research-based drug companies, doesn't like it - they are now considering what to do. But HIV/Aids campaigners are celebrating. The Mumbai patent office has rejected Abbott's application for a patent in India on its drug Kaletra - a combination of the two antiretroviral medicines lopinavir and ritonavir. The decision could help enable the manufacture of cheap versions of a key Aids drug, reports the London Guardian.
A new study from the American Journal of Public Health reports that mining is a significant determinant of countrywide variation in tuberculosis among sub-Saharan African nations. The study's authors conclude, 'Our findings suggest that mining profoundly affects not only the health of miners but also the dynamics of TB incidence in sub-Saharan African nations...As shown by the population risk of mining, improved public health and health care conditions for miners may be necessary not only for the miners themselves, but for controlling TB more generally among sub-Saharan African populations.'
Associate Programme Officer (Advocacy): The job purpose is to contribute to the achievement of RCK mission of improving refuges welfare by influencing polices, systems, structures and practices of the Government, UNHCR and partners though lobbying and advocacy.
Associate Programme Officer (Information and research): The job purpose is to contribute to the achievement of RCK information/ research programme by assisting the programme officer in coordinating and performance of activities such as sourcing of materials, liaising with the media, research institutions and disseminating information.
Pambazuka News 511: Côte d’Ivoire elections: Chronicle of a failure foretold
Pambazuka News 511: Côte d’Ivoire elections: Chronicle of a failure foretold
The University of Cambridge's Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR, www?.?polis?.?cam?.?ac?.?uk/cghr) is seeking to appoint a post-doctoral Research Associate to work for up to 22 months on our new research project ‘New communication technologies and citizen-led governance in Africa’, funded by the Cairns Family Trust and the Isaac Newton Trust.
Guest editor David Anderson Hooker, Director of Research and Training for Coming to the Table: Taking America (USA) Beyond the Legacy of Enslavement, and the editorial staff of Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, invite submissions for the first issue of its fifth volume, entitled ‘500 Years Later: Reverberations of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.’
Online activists have attacked and at least momentarily disabled several Tunisian government websites in the latest act of protest against the country's embattled leadership. As of Monday afternoon, local time, at least eight websites had been affected, including those for the president, prime minister, ministry of industry, ministry of foreign affairs, and the stock exchange. The attack, which began on Sunday night, coincided with a national strike, planned to take place on Monday, that organisers said would be the biggest popular event of its size since Zine El Abidine Ben Ali assumed the presidency.
The world's biggest corporations are rushing to grab and convert living plant matter - called 'biomass' - into fuel, chemicals, and other profitable products. This new 'biomass economy' represents a trillion dollar industry but it will not feed the people or stop climate change. In order to shed light on this new economy, farm leaders from the Global South participated in a public forum to share their reality and propose alternatives. Presented by Food Secure Canada with: Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, Development and Peace, ETC Group, GRAIN, Greenpeace, Inter Pares, National Farmers Union, Peoples Food Policy Project, The Ram's Horn, Union Paysanne, USC Canada. Eight videos from the forum are available through the link provided.
'We are writing to express our grave concern about the recent escalation of homophobia throughout the African continent. A vocal minority spouting hatred, paranoia, and intolerance is dominating public discourse. In response, increasing numbers of parliaments are attempting to criminalise homosexuality, and increasing numbers of African leaders are publicly endorsing this criminalisation. Currently, over two-thirds of countries in the African Union have legislation that criminalises homosexuality. AIDS-Free World is disturbed by the silence of AU leaders in the face of this discrimination, and we urgently call upon the African Union to hold a special session to address the issue.'
This edition includes the articles:
- The extraversion of protest: conditions, history and use of the ‘international’ in Africa,
Marie-Emmanuelle Pommerolle
- Internal dynamics, the state, and recourse to external aid: towards a historical sociology of the peasant movement in Senegal since the 1960s
- Peasant struggles in Mali: from defending cotton producers’ interests to becoming part of the Malian power structures by Alexis Roy.
Click on the link provided to access the journal.
Kenyan journalists assumed senior politicians from the ruling party and opposition would be singled out for inciting the public to kill after the 2007 presidential elections - but they were shocked to find out last year that one of their own has been named by the International Criminal Court. While most local journalists supported the decision, some fear the government will use this case as a basis to silence the press. The Information Minister often uses the alleged role played by the local media during the post-election violence as a justification to crack down on the media, the chairman of the Kenya Editors Guild, Macharia Gaitho, said.
The Forced Migration Current Awareness Blog is a current awareness service highlighting web research and information relating to refugees, asylum-seekers, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and other forced migrants. Visit the website for analysis and commentary related to this field.
Defense spending in Africa has increased significantly over the last few years, largely because the continent's key oil producers have scored heavy economic gains as crude prices have risen, finds a new survey. The surge in oil revenue 'has provided an opportunity for African governments to support much-needed military acquisition and improvement programs, resulting in defense spending growth that has significantly outpaced that of non-petrostates,' the survey said, as reported by United Press International.
Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos at the end of 2010 gave a state-of-the-nation address to the citizenry in Luanda, a move analysts say was doubtlessly informed by the looming 2012 general election. Dos Santos, who has ruled Angola for 30 years, focused his end-year speech on the polls. Under the terms of the new constitution which was approved early this year, dos Santos will not face a direct presidential election. He will instead be automatically elected from the top of legislative poll lists.
Citizens of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) expelled from neighbouring Angola continued to arrive in their country of origin this month, with many reporting that they were subjected to mistreatment, including sexual violence, the United Nations humanitarian office said on 29 December. Some 1,355 expellees have arrived in DRC’s Bas-Congo and Kasai provinces since 11 December, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a press release.
Angola has denied that mercenaries from the country were operating in Ivory Coast, following reports that defiant strongman Laurent Gbagbo's camp had recruited hired guns from Angola and Liberia. The statement came after the United Nations' top peacekeeper, Alain Le Roy, said last week the UN had confirmed that Gbagbo forces were working with foreign mercenaries in their bid to gain the upper hand in the political stand-off between Gbagbo and presidential rival Alassane Ouattara.
Government has dismissed predictions that this year’s general elections would be the bloodiest ever, describing the prophecy as an attempt to threaten peace and security. And Foundation for Democratic Process (FODEP) has described the statement from Colonel Panji Kaunda as irresponsible and alarming. Kaunda was on 3 January quoted saying Zambia will experience bloody violence if Government does not put measures in place to stop it.
Wikileaks has revealed diplomatic cables complaining of favouritism and suspicion of corruption in the manner Air Tanzania Company Limited (ATCL) went about shopping for jetliners for its ageing fleet four years ago. The newspaper report titled: 'Diplomats Help Push Sales of Jetliners on the Global Market. Tanzania and the Fight to Stop Airbus Sale,' said Boeing executives, at times, were pressed by foreign government officials and airline executives to hire 'agents' or other intermediaries to help deliver a sale.
The Global Fund has once again rejected Malawi’s request for funding which it submitted last year amounting to about $560million to support its national response towards HIV/AIDS for a five-year period. Principal Secretary in the Office of the President responsible for HIV/Aids and Malnutrition, Mary Shaba, confirmed the board’s rejection but said the country was still waiting for official communication from the Global Fund on the reasons that led to such decision. However, other reports indicate that Malawi’s proposal was rejected because the country’s laws are rigid and do not favour the marginalised groups. Malawi still criminalises homosexuality and prostitution.
The Uganda government is seeking $1 million under a supplementary budget request to parliament to facilitate a meeting with Congolese officials and lawyers – whose country accuses Uganda of war crimes and plunder of its resources. The meeting is slated for later this month in Kampala. DR Congo accuses Uganda of war crimes and plundering its resources when the latter, together with a bevy of regional countries, invaded it between 1998 and 2003. In 1999, Congo took Uganda to the World Court - seeking reparations of between of $6b and $10b - which the court said was a fair claim. The UN court sitting at The Hague, however, gave the countries an option of settling the matter between themselves.
Somali pirates have hijacked a Mozambican-flagged fishing vessel about 200 nautical miles (370 km) southwest of Comoros in the Indian Ocean, the European Union's anti-piracy taskforce said at the beginning of January. The capture of the 140-tonne Vega 5 and its 14-strong crew of unknown nationalities is the second successful strike by pirates off the northern tip of Madagascar in a week.
The future of Zimbabweans without legal documentation in South Africa is uncertain, after a brief window to regularise their stay in the country slammed shut last week. The South African government has said more than 232,000 Zimbabweans applied to legalise their stay in the country before the December 31st deadline passed last Friday. This means that an estimated million Zim nationals who live in South Africa have missed this opportunity to apply for relevant work or study permits.
While some African companies are nervous about Asian competition on their own turf, the arrival of Chinese industrialists signals an important opportunity for Africa to assert itself while absorbing new technology and expanding the continent’s export capacity from raw materials to finished products. The Chinese are queueing up to start businesses in Africa. 'In France it was so-so,' says Joseph Kosure, the CEO of Kenya’s Export Processing Zones Authority, who is on a worldwide tour to showcase Kenya’s potential. 'The hall was half-full of French businessmen. But in Shanghai, two weeks ago, we had to change rooms! People were standing in the aisles.'
A French judge placed Rwanda's defence minister and five other aides of President Paul Kagame under investigation in a probe into an attack seen as sparking the African country's 1994 genocide, legal sources said on 16 December. Placing the men under investigation means that international arrest warrants issued for them - which led to Rwanda cutting off diplomatic relations with France in 2006 - can be dropped, reports The Independent.
There’s a nagging misconception that all significant environmental progress begins in wealthy nations, which then shoulder the noble task of aiding and arm-twisting poor nations to do their share in taking care of the planet. But the developing world doesn’t simply do less of what’s wrong, they also have taken some bold steps in embracing a greener future, writes Jay Walljasper on Just last month Kenya adopted a 'new constitution' that declares in Article 42, 'Every person has the right to a clean and healthy environment, which includes the right—a) to have the environment protected for the benefit of present and future generations through legislative and other measures.'
The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information has said that the bombing of a church in Alexandria proves that the emergency law imposed on Egypt for 30 years has not provided security and safety to Egyptians. 'This law resulted in nothing but an acute retreat in civil and political freedoms and wasting rights of Muslim and Christian Egyptians.'
Henry Kosgey faces 10 years in jail if he is convicted on 12 charges of abuse of office filed in a Nairobi court last Tuesday, reports the Daily Nation. Each of the 12 charges carries a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment, but if convicted he would most likely be ordered to serve them concurrently. The veteran politician was arraigned in court just hours after announcing that he was stepping aside as minister for Industrialisation following Attorney-General Amos Wako’s authorisation that the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission could arrest and charge him for illegally allowing the importation of an over-age vehicle.
Makerere University is considering altering its government sponsorship admission criteria to ensure that reasonable numbers of both girls and boys are admitted to each course. The new measures are expected to be in place before Makerere’s admissions in August. They may impose an admission ratio of 60:40 for government sponsorship in humanities (arts) and a 70:30 ratio for science courses, in favour of the less-represented sex in each academic discipline.
If Mugabe were to call an election in 2011, it would be widely viewed as a political attack on South African President Jacob Zuma, says a new political brief from Idasa. 'South Africa and SADC would not support any such movement by Mugabe or Zanu PF. It must be noted that political activity has not been banned, a signal that an election may not be imminent. Finally, if a constitutional referendum is not held before a fresh election, it would likely prove very difficult to mobilise the population.'
In the last six years, there has been a dramatic increase in foreign investment in land deals across Africa and the Malibya deal - a 50-year lease agreed by the Malian and Libyan Presidents - has become totemic of the fear that this new phenomenon of land grabbing will deprive subsistence farmers of their land and their food, reports The Guardian. Mali is one of the countries most affected by the scramble for land, and Segou, the country’s rice basket, is at the eye of the storm, with buyers from Senegal, South Africa, and Asia, as well as domestic companies snapping up leases on thousands of hectares.
The Accra-based sub-regional rights body, Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), has decried the 'high-handedness' of Ghana’s security agencies against media workers while calling on authorities 'to ensure that journalists pursue their legitimate duties without fear or intimidation', PANA reports. MFWA made the call in a statement signed by its Executive Director, Prof. Kwame Karikari, following the arrest and detention of a radio journalist, Issah Murtala Kpambe.
Tanzania's umbrella labour union is planning a nationwide peaceful demonstrations to protest the government's decision to hike power tariffs by 18.5 per cent effective 1 January 2011, the body's leadership said. 'As workers we are not convinced with the way the government and the Tanzania Electric Supply Company (TANESCO) decided to increase power tariffs while aware that most of our people are leading miserable lives,' said Nicholas Mgaya, acting secretary general of the Trade Union Congress of Tanzania (TUCTA).
More than 5,000 Mauritanian refugees, intending to return home following a tripartite agreement between the governments of Senegal and Mauritania and the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), signed in November 2007, have expressed uncertainty in the move, PANA has reported. Mamadou Wane, spokesman for the Steering Committee of Coordination of the Associations of the Mauritanian Refugees in Senegal, said no information had been given to the UNHCR representative in Dakar to assure the 5,000 Mauritanian refugees awaiting repatriation.
South Africa may start deporting more than 1.2 million Zimbabweans in April after they missed a deadline to legalise their residency, Lawyers For Human Rights said. Almost 255,000 Zimbabweans applied to legalise their residency before the 31 December deadline, South Africa’s government said while ruling out an extension to the process. A 'conservative' estimate by Johannesburg’s University of The Witwatersrand is that there are 1.5 million Zimbabweans in South Africa.
Sudan VoteMonitor is a pilot project led by the Sudan Institute for Research and Policy (SIRP) and Asmaa Society for Development, in collaboration with other Sudanese civil society organisations, and supported by eMoksha.org and Ushahidi.com (technical partners). The purpose is to use information and communication technology (ICT) to support the independent monitoring and reporting of the election process and results.
France's highest court has upheld an order to extradite Rwandan rebel leader Callixte Mbarushimana to face trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC). A lawyer for Mbarushimana said the court had rejected his client's appeal against extradition. Mbarushimana is accused of 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, allegedly committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo last year.
Fahamu and UHAI are co-organising a training programme called the Movement Building Boot Camp. The goal of the MBBC is to grow and strengthen the base of leadership among East African activists working on sexual rights and LGBTI rights. As part of this, the training will build and deepen skills and knowledge on issues of sexuality, gender and human rights, power and accountability. Please do note that this Movement Building Boot Camp is for East African activists only.
For more information and to participate in this exciting and novel journey, kindly fill in the online application form () by 22 January 2011.
Gary K. Busch examines the current stand-off between Alassane Outtara and Laurent Gbagbo through a neocolonial lens, calling into question the international response to the crisis.
Tunisian lawyers have been making a stand throughout protests in that country - and paying the price for it. The lawyers have been protesting regularly to denounce what happened in Sidi Bouzid and the social situation in Tunisia. This is why the government has decided to ‘punish’ them. Every day, news of the kidnapping, arrest, or assault of lawyers is surfacing on social networking sites, report bloggers via Global Voices.
Up to 80 African migrants are feared to have drowned off the south coast of Yemen after their boats capsized, Yemeni officials say. The migrants, mostly from Ethiopia, were travelling in two boats which were hit by strong wind and waves, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
The head of Egypt's Coptic Church appealed for calm as protesters clashed with police for a third day last week after a New Year's Day blast killed 23 churchgoers. Pope Shenouda III also called on Egypt's government to address Christian concerns about discrimination. Late on Monday, protesters again clashed with riot police in Cairo, demanding protection and justice.
To many people Facebook is a tool to announce what they are doing or what they have done, yet to some Zambians, it is being used as ‘Agony Aunt’ from which they are seeking advice on many social problems affecting them, reports Global Voices. A social work graduate from the University of Zambia, Tina Banda, started a Facebook page called Real Life and Hot Issues Discussion Forum with Tina Banda on which a number of topics are posted everyday and responses given by other Facebook users.
The second India-Africa Forum Summit takes place in 2011, three years after the inaugural event in New Delhi. Sub-Saharan Africa’s exports to India have almost trebled over the past five years and Indian-African business links – particularly in energy resources, precious metals and uranium – have boomed. This paper from Chatham House assesses the prospects for the 2011 India–Africa Forum.
Namibia is set to develop its rich uranium resources and intends to pursue uranium enrichment locally. It also plans to build its own nuclear electricity plant. Nuclear energy experts from Finland’s Nuclear and Radiation Authority are currently helping the Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME) to draft Namibia’s first ever nuclear policy, which is to be completed mid-2011, together with relevant laws. Namibia plans to generate electricity from its own nuclear reactor by 2018.
Gado shows political leaders demonstrating how to win elections…
Medical experts have warned that malaria and HIV have monopolised interventions geared towards curbing child mortality in Kenya, thus ignoring the equally deadly killer, diarrhoea. This disease has silently claimed the lives of hundreds of children every year. Cecilia Njambi, a mother of two, lost her first-born son to diarrhoea. 'He hadn’t slept well the previous night and had complained that his tummy hurt. His stool was loose but we weren’t alarmed as no one takes diarrhoea seriously anyway. We just assumed that he must have eaten something that didn’t go down well with him.'
For those who walked the walk
Even to the graves of those who fell
Those who held out…
In Zambia, a silver lining has emerged for widespread rural hunger and poverty, thanks to homegrown agricultural research. Local scientists have successfully developed four new, early-maturing and high- yielding cassava cultivars in an ambitious research project conducted in the cassava-rich Luapula Province, under the on-going Root and Tuber Improvement Programme (RTIP).
At the end of 2010 at least 4.5 million people were internally displaced in Darfur, the Greater Khartoum area, South Kordofan and the ten states of Southern Sudan. It is thought that in December 2010 there were between 4.5 and 5.2 million IDPs, in the western region of Darfur (where estimates ranged between 1.9 million and 2.7 million), in and around Khartoum, in the state of South Kordofan and in Southern Sudan. In addition, there were unknown numbers of IDPs in the other northern and eastern states.
Activist Kambale Musavuli has a new year message for Congolese youth.
Unrest following Côte d'Ivoire's presidential election is blocking a nationwide vaccination drive against yellow fever, a fatal mosquito-borne disease that is affecting people throughout the country. In the past month 11 people have died in the centre-north departments of Séguéla, Katiola, and Béoumi; two cases of yellow fever have been confirmed and there are a further 21 suspected cases in those departments and in nearby Mankono, according to local health workers and the World Health Organisation (WHO).
With Nigeria not yet compliant with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), Uche Igwe calls for greater transparency in the country’s extractive industry.
As Sudan approaches its historic referendum on 9 January, Current Analyst discusses the possible range of developments.
Khadija Sharife examines the twists and turns in the battle over who will mine a rich iron ore deposit in the Northern Cape in South Africa.